During our editorship of BJME from 2003 to 2007, we sensed a persistent question in the background – ‘what's the function of such a journal at the present time?’ As outlets for publication, journals compete with conference papers, anthology chapters and monographs: what is published (and where) can affect academic careers. However, in his reflections as a ‘recovering’ editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture, James E. Adams (Reference ADAMS2005) argues that while we have to confront the wider context in which academic journals operate, nevertheless such publications have the core functions of considering and reconsidering the nature of a discipline or field of study, they can urge or forecast future developments, and they can sustain an intellectual community.

As incoming editors, we wanted to address the nature and extent of music education as ‘an eclectic field of study’ (Cox & Pitts, Reference COX and PITTS2003: 119) In this connection one of the first things we did was to invite a multidisciplinary group of scholars in ethnomusicology, history, music therapy, philosophy, psychology and sociology, to reflect upon how their discipline might contribute to music education. This materialised in the special issue entitled ‘Perspectives on Music Education’ (BJME, Reference Cox and Pitts2003). Jonathan Stock (Reference STOCK2003) helpfully clarified the matter:

Our hope was that the papers we published would contribute to a research tradition which would become more open and consequently less circumscribed. But in considering the nature of our field of study it was important for us to remember that BJME does not exist solely for researchers – it also has a historic link with the music teaching profession. We were very much aware of its original aims, ‘to help us towards a better-informed and possibly more cohesive profession’ (Paynter & Swanwick, Reference PAYNTER and SWANWICK1984: 5), and indeed of the publicity strap-line of the journal, ‘written by professionals for professionals’. However, one of the fundamental changes in British academic life introduced in 1986, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), profoundly altered the function of academic journals, so that the gulf between ‘professional’ and ‘academic’ writing widened. The bracing challenge for us as editors was to ensure both the rigour and the relevance of the research that was published. We hoped that BJME wouldn't just become another RAE factory, but rather would be able to bridge the artificial divide between academics and professionals. The matter was forthrightly put by Janet Mills (Reference MILLS2005):

Whether or not all music education research is necessarily utilitarian demands an informed debate, and certainly we wanted a balance between such thinking and research which might adventurously forecast new horizons, or might look to the past for inspiration. We instituted as an occasional feature ‘Points for Debate’, in which authors were invited to be controversial. It was to include a considerable range of thinking, from Tim Cain's ‘Theory, technology and the music curriculum’ (2004), to Jere Humphreys’ ‘Toward a reconstruction of ‘creativity’ in music education’ (2006). We were also intent on relating our present to our past, and historical research was represented by David Ghere and Fred Amram (Reference GHERE and AMRAM2007) and Jane Southcott (Reference SOUTHCOTT2007). But quite rightly the majority of articles within BJME have aimed to have some ‘useful’ impact on the thinking and practice of music educators, working in schools, higher education, or in studios.

It became increasingly apparent to us that BJME was becoming a significant contributor to the international debate about music education. This was evident both in terms of the journal's readership and authorship: we were delighted that nearly 40 per cent of authors during our editorship came from outside Britain. But whatever the setting it was our aim to publish research that dealt with fundamental questions of educational purposes and values.

In this article we identify a number of themes that emerged in the five volumes we edited which between them offer a newly expanded focus for research in musical teaching and learning. The themes include:

• • The roles and identities of music teachers.

• • Pupil perspectives: access and inclusivity.

• • Blurring of boundaries between home, school and community.

• • Music in higher education.

We shall discuss each theme in turn, drawing connections between related articles, and offering some thoughts on the impact and longevity of the ideas. Finally we shall argue that the publication of such research illuminates the core function of the BJME which we believe is to strengthen that field of study which is music education.

The roles and identities of music teachers

Teaching music in schools is multifaceted. A former editor of Music Teacher recollected

The different skills required to hold all this together are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to be part of the average music teacher's professional equipment (Pitts, Reference PITTS2000). As far as teaching music in the primary school is concerned, it appears that the challenge is to harmonise the respective roles of the generalist and the specialist teachers. Janet Mills (Reference MILLS2005) encapsulated the issue:

Hilary Holden and Stuart Button (Reference HOLDEN and BUTTON2006) investigated the extent to which ‘non-specialist’ teachers felt able to teach music to children, and the support they received. These teachers ranked music as the subject in which they felt least confidence: it was their perception that music was essentially specialist in its nature, requiring expertise in performing ability. In spite of this, and somewhat surprisingly, 58% expressed some confidence in teaching the subject. But there was no doubt that they had a strong preference for in-class support from music specialists: whilst they felt confident in their own pedagogical skill, they were less secure with subject method content and knowledge.

The role of the music specialist or subject leader was addressed by Gary Beauchamp and Janet Harvey (Reference BEAUCHAMP and HARVEY2006) in a study focusing on three subject leaders. All three believed that music was different from other subjects because of its specialised skills base, and saw their role as addressing the perceived lack of ability and confidence of their colleagues, so that music ceased to be ‘one of those scary areas’. But the research also pinpointed the nature of the leadership roles of the music co-ordinators: decisions were taken by the headteacher, representing a benign centralised assertive leadership, and this was accepted by the coordinators as a reality of their working lives. The result of this, however, was that they found difficulty in conceptualising their own leadership and management roles: they implemented decisions, rather than inventing them.

Arising from these two studies, the following appear as priorities: strengthening the confidence of the generalist teacher; challenging the common perception of primary teachers that music is ‘different’ from other subjects; defining and strengthening leadership roles in primary school music.

In secondary schools we take it for granted that the teaching will be undertaken by subject specialists, for whom the subject curriculum is at the heart of what they do – it plays a crucial role in their identity (see Cox, Reference COX1999). But Vic Gammon (Reference GAMMON2003) had become ‘quite concerned’ at the level of subject knowledge of some of the individuals he had recruited for the PGCE (Post Graduate Certificate in Education) course. He devised a subject knowledge quiz incorporating questions about both the Western musical tradition and ‘world’ music. He found the general musical knowledge of potential secondary music teachers ‘inadequate’. The cause was partly attributable to a chasm Gammon identified between the requirements of the National Curriculum for Teacher Training, with its focus on definable subject knowledge, and music degree requirements based upon a number of different areas of learning with no common body of knowledge. To rectify the situation Gammon presented two stark alternatives: to change fundamentally either the nature of university courses, or the requirements of the National Curriculum.

We know very little about the professional lives of music teachers, and this is a crucial area, as music teacher recruitment has been problematic for a long time. This neglect has been addressed as far as instrumental teachers are concerned by the work of David Baker (Reference BAKER2005, Reference BAKER2006). He first considered the impact of teachers’ own music education, finding that for new entrants to the profession, memories of school music were generally poor, whilst those of youth ensembles were highly significant. It was performance that galvanised them, and music service work was a safety net, sometimes a substitution, for a more precarious career in the performing world. Amongst teachers between the ages of 36 and 42, Baker found new features of self-identity, including longitudinal experience, increased maturity towards students, and a heightened comprehension of children sourced from their own parenthood. There was a healthy self-regard, as teachers in this group saw themselves as the dependable backbone of the service, but torments surfaced about restricted occupational prospects. Such life history research with its emphasis upon teachers’ thinking from their own perspectives, could well be extended to music teachers working in a whole variety of contexts ranging from primary through secondary to university levels. The findings would provide helpful insights to managers and to policy makers.

All of this research activity, encompassing very different educational sectors, in a sense connects with the developments we are witnessing currently such as the Music Manifesto, Wider Opportunities and Musical Futures. In Creating a Land with Music, Rogers (Reference ROGERS2002) pointed out that ‘Encouraging talented musicians into some kind of specialist teaching is an urgent task’, they might become music ‘paraprofessionals’ working in schools in collaboration with music teachers. More recently Swanwick (Reference SWANWICK2008) has reported upon a Youth Music project, in which the traditional boundaries between the ‘general’ class music teacher, and the ‘private’ instrumental and vocal teacher, are breaking down, to encompass such a new categorisation as ‘music leader’ i.e. ‘a category of music educators . . . who may not even regard themselves as teachers, but would rather see themselves as musicians, wishing only to communicate their ways of making music to others’ (p. 13).

Pupil perspectives: access and inclusivity

The idea of providing music education for all children regardless of gender, social class and cultural background is an ambitious one, linked as it is ‘to the democratic principles of equality, universal suffrage, and participation’ (Woodford, Reference WOODFORD2005: 57). In this section we group together some articles which look at access and inclusivity as related to music teaching.

Enabling all pupils to have access to music in schools was one of the key features of an article by school pupil Eleanor Denny (Reference DENNY2007), who posed the question ‘To what extent does participation in extracurricular music affect the future aspirations of 11–12 year-olds?’ Denny had noted that a lot of pupils dropped out of extracurricular music, and she wanted to look at those who remained, and the extent of the influence upon them of parental attitudes and backgrounds. She focused on two primary schools, one in a less affluent area than the other. Through a questionnaire-based investigation she found that musical participation was linked to parental enthusiasm for music, but the reason for the difference between pupils who participated and those who did not, lay in parental finances rather than cultural background. Denny also found that musical participation amongst her respondents led to higher aspirations. Her conclusion was that funding for music should be increased as musical participation can not only raise academic performance but also raise future aspirations. In his response to the article, John Finney (Reference FINNEY2007) connects Denny's work with the growing movement referred to as ‘pupil voice’. Such research

A number of articles have focused upon the influence of gender on students’ attitudes towards music in schools, and hence on their decisions to participate. Well before our editorship, Jo Glover (Reference GLOVER1993) had this to say in her introduction to a special issue of BJME on Music, Gender and Education:

Such self-searching reflection and re-examination is to be found in Clare Hall's study (2005) of gender and boys’ singing in early childhood. Her project involved five-year-olds in a private boys’ school in Australia, and aimed to discover whether their attitudes betrayed gender-stereotyped beliefs about singing, and if so, whether peer modelling might help to overcome these. Hall found that there was indeed alarming evidence of negative attitudes towards singing in boys in their first year of school. Most of them felt that singing was inappropriate as an element of male behaviour. Their attitudes showed a rejection of feminine constructs and implied that these boys were already influenced by hegemonic masculinity on entering their first year in school. More positively, the use of peer modelling (Hall used two older active music students from Year 3 and Year 10) achieved increased levels of vocal participation, while contributing to boys’ learning on many levels. We might view this practical application of peer modelling as an extension of Finney's ideas about the ‘pupil voice’ in educational research and practice.

The question Hall had focused upon was succinctly expressed by Scott Harrison (Reference HARRISON2007) in a way familiar to music teachers concerned about gendered participation in music: ‘What's happening to the boys?’ His research was in two phases: tertiary students were surveyed about the extent to which the perception of stereotyping of instrumental choice was apparent, and adult males were asked about their experiences of music at school. Harrison concluded that the masculine-feminine perceptions of musical participation continue to exist in the minds of musicians and the wider population, and that as the study of boys’ perceptions has often been viewed from a feminist perspective, boys have been less fortunate than girls and remain restricted by the gender order. It is up to practising music educators, Harrison argues,

Finally in this discussion of gender attitudes towards music, Brigitte Charles (Reference CHARLES2004) looked at boys’ and girls’ constructions of gender through musical composition in the primary school. Her investigation was carried out with 8–10-year-olds in a London primary school in a multi-ethnic working-class area. Charles found that children did have gendered expectations in relation to music, and strong ideas about differences, but her most interesting findings were the contradictions between discourse and observable musical practice. In interview, girls portrayed themselves as preferring soft and slow music, and the playing of smaller ‘feminine’ instruments. In practice they sometimes played music which was fast and loud on instruments associated with pop music. Whilst the girls in conversation thought that boys’ behaviour prevented them from achieving, in practice some girls’ groups also behaved badly, were non-cooperative, and disorganised. Charles’ conclusion was that pupils were not yet trying out in practice what they said in discourse, but that once they entered secondary school the strength of the ideology would become greater, and the contradiction between musical discourse and practice would decrease.

These studies are concerned with providing access to music for all pupils, and illustrate something of the complexity which music educators face in realising this aim in their day-to-day work. More positively such research should provide the opportunity for advocacy. As Woodford (Reference WOODFORD2005) points out

In this survey of articles relating to pupil perspectives, it became apparent to us that there was a relative absence of research relating to the inclusion in music education of cultural minorities and those with special needs. Music education has readily embraced cultural diversity in its curriculum content, but there is a need for further documentation and analysis of the extent to which the music classroom is an accessible and welcoming place for all pupils.

Blurring boundaries: music in home, school and community

In this section we focus particularly upon the contexts of music making, exploring the view put forward by the music psychologists who contributed to our Special Issue (Hargreaves et al., Reference HARGREAVES, MARSHALL and NORTH2003) that the ‘problem of school music’, particularly in England, lies in finding the balance between learning in and out of school. Alongside this distinction is the increasing prominence given to the ‘third environment’ – those social contexts where musical learning takes place in the absence of parents or teachers, in which musical activities become self-directed. The relationship between music in school and home has historically been an uneasy one: teachers once saw themselves as offering ‘protection [. . .] against the attractions of vulgar and sentimental music’ (Board of Education, 1927: 253), and were initially cautious in embracing the new independence in listening afforded to teenagers by the growth of popular music. Times, and music consumption habits, have changed: school music can no longer be seen as an isolated or even predominant influence in children's musical development, and new ways must be found to connect and make sense of the varied experiences of listening to and creating music that are available to young people.

If all this suggests a state of flux or even crisis in music education, it is encouraging to set these challenges in the context of the large scale survey of ‘young people's music in and out of school’ carried out by Alexandra Lamont, David Hargreaves, Nigel Marshall and Mark Tarrant (2003). Enjoyment of music lessons, while declining from Year 4 (8–9-year-olds) to Year 9 (13–14-year-olds), was higher than in previously reported surveys, with composing, teamwork and performance generating most enthusiasm. Pupils welcomed opportunities to blur the boundaries between their home and school music-making, by listening to or playing their own choice of music in lessons. If taken too far, this approach would have limitations in narrowing the curriculum to music with which young people are already familiar – but conversely, the chance to build on existing enthusiasms is a gift to music teachers who can capitalise on students’ thirst for knowledge and skills in an area which has such prominence in their lives.

In the rest of this section we shall consider four contexts of music-making sometimes in collaboration with schools, at other times not: connecting schools with community musicians; ‘extra-curricular’ events in schools; examples of musical learning within communities including lifelong learning; the implications of technology in blurring the boundaries of these different contexts.

Nita Temmerman (Reference TEMMERMAN2005) offered a perspective on ‘connecting the cultural contexts’ from Australia, where at the time of writing only one state (New South Wales) had mandatory music education in primary schools. One solution to such patchy music education provision, Temmerman suggested, might be a national mentoring programme where teachers and community musicians work more closely together to provide enriched performance opportunities for students. In these proposals, Temmerman put practical music-making at the heart of a drive towards educational provision which lays foundations for lifelong musical learning. She acknowledged that framing policies is not the same as generating action, but nevertheless her hope for comprehensive and inclusive music education is no doubt widely shared by readers of BJME, and her proposals might usefully be investigated further by future writers in the journal.

By focusing on performing activities as a way of connecting school music with the wider musical world, Temmerman hints at the fact that making music is perhaps the strongest motivation for young people's interest in school music. While they might become listening experts without the need for adult intervention (Hargreaves et al., Reference HARGREAVES, MARSHALL and NORTH2003), learning to perform usually involves the direction of a teacher – though studies of the exceptions to this rule bring these traditional models into question (cf. Green, Reference GREEN2001).

Extra-curricular music is often a route into greater engagement with music, giving pupils and teachers the opportunity to relate more informally through shared goals related to authentic performance rather than imposed assessment. Christopher McGillen (Reference MCGILLEN2004) reported a project which took this one step further, giving adolescent musicians autonomy in writing for and directing a band in which staff and students were equal members. He describes the relationship between band members, and between their classroom and extra-curricular activities, as ‘positive interdependence’, in which identity and responsibility grew alongside musical opportunity and achievement.

Such aims and approaches reach across cultures and contexts, and are just as relevant in Adrian Poole's (Reference POOLE2004) ethnography of bhangra and Joseph Ng'andu and Anri Herbst's (Reference NG'ANDU and HERBST2004) description of inshimi storytelling in the Bemba communities of Zambia. Amongst Poole's informants from South Asian backgrounds at a school in Essex, one group particularly identified with devotional music in the Sikh tradition, and the Sikh gurdwaras played a significant role in providing a venue for and nurturing informal community-based music education, particularly in relation to the instruction of the harmonium, dholki and tabla. The balance between musical learning in and out of school is complex and culturally situated. This is also nicely illustrated in the Zambian context: Ng'andu and Herbst argue that as an oral practice, Inshimi uses imagination, integration, interaction, repetition and metaphor to socialise Bemba communities, it should consequently provide a foundation for all education.

Finding deliberate opportunities for musical learning is something that continues into adulthood for a small but significant minority of people (cf. Pitts, Reference PITTS2005) – and given an increasing research and policy focus on lifelong learning it is a surprise to find that topic currently under-represented in the journal. Peter Cope's (Reference COPE2005) consideration of adults learning Scottish traditional music was one of the few papers to look at lifelong musical education, through interviews with 13 adult learners attending workshops in traditional fiddling. None of Cope's interviewees had particularly fond memories of school music, though all had received some kind of education in classical music listening, singing or instrumental playing. Their return to musical engagement had been prompted by a desire for the satisfaction of gaining or improving skills, or by hearing a band and wanting to be involved (Cope, Reference COPE2005: 129). All were committed to regular membership of a group, and gained much of their enjoyment from the social engagement of learning and playing together. Cope suggests that the intrinsic motivation of these adults, sustained despite the frustrations that come with acquiring new technical skills later in life, offer useful lessons for school music, which might benefit from ‘a willingness to allow learners to take more control over their own learning’ (ibid.: 139).

Technologies are changing the ways in which young people access music, and schools can be hard pressed to keep pace with new forms of knowledge exchange and musical interaction, much less to consider the implications these developments might have for the relevance (or otherwise) of traditional skills and teaching methods. Several papers published during our editorship reflected on new ways of engaging with music, each of which offered considerable autonomy to students in making musical progress, and encouraged interactions with peers as a source of instruction and critical feedback. Miikka Salavuo (Reference SALAVUO2006) documented some of the ways in which young people distribute and discuss their music in online communities, by-passing conventional systems of music production and promotion. Their activities are at once more social, in that the exchange of ideas, musical tastes and compositional processes is made public; but also less social, since the need for face to face contact is lessened by online communication. Fred Seddon (Reference SEDDON2006) explored the use of such online interactions within formal learning, and noted that prior instrumental training increased the quality of dialogue and complexity of musical exploration for pairs of students engaged in collaborative computer-based composition. In a comparable study with much younger children, Anna Rita Addessi and François Pachet (2005) provided a look into the future with their focus upon the interaction between children and musical machines. Three- to five-year-olds improvised on a ‘continuator’ keyboard, which generated responses to their playing and sustained a musical dialogue – one in which the machine always had the last word!

Such practices present new challenges for teachers, in that ‘mainstream environments of musical practice for musicians in their teens and 20s’ (Salavuo, Reference SALAVUO2006: 265) are not so mainstream for their teachers, opening up a generational gap in training and ease with technology for even the youngest of classroom practitioners. These gaps can be bridged, of course – and Michael Webb (2007) offered some practical suggestions for doing this – but there are dangers in expecting teachers to add constantly to their repertoire of classroom approaches, without ever reviewing or replacing older methods. It is impossible to teach everything within the confines of the time and resources allocated to music in schools, and there is a place for humbly admitting that there are times when students are better equipped to teach themselves, one another – and their teachers.

Music in higher education

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a shift in research and policy attitudes towards higher education, and BJME has witnessed an increased scrutiny of student experience by university and conservatoire practitioners engaging in what is sometimes called ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’. The Special Issue on ‘Instrumental Teaching in Higher Education’ (BJME, Reference Mills and Moore2005) edited by Janet Mills and Hilary Moore illustrated the ways in which reflective research on practice could be beneficial to staff and students alike. Meanwhile, British governments in recent years have aimed to increase the numbers of school leavers continuing to higher education, introducing policies of ‘widening participation’ to support first generation students and minority groups. But music raises particular challenges of accessibility, relying very often on years of prior learning and established performance skills – which in turn bring an implicit assumption of parental support, both financial and emotional (Dibben, Reference DIBBEN2006). The decision to pursue music in higher education is not one that can be taken lightly at the age of 18.

Questions about who is able to access a university or conservatoire education in music invite careful definitions of the subject itself: is advanced performance an intrinsic part of musical learning; is literacy essential; in short, what are the vital components of a music degree – from the teachers’ and students’ perspectives? These questions in turn have implications for school music teaching, which must prepare a small minority of students for the possibility of higher education in music, while remaining open to the many other opportunities that exist for continuing in musical activity after school years. This conundrum is rarely articulated, with the result that students beginning university or college often have confused or unrealistic expectations – while those who cease formal learning when they leave school might later wonder about the relevance of their classroom teaching (Cope, Reference COPE2005).

Consider the case of students beginning a conservatoire degree, as reported by Rosie Burt and Janet Mills (Reference BURT and MILLS2006). Thirteen students were tracked from pre-entry through to the end of their first term – a notoriously challenging time for university students adjusting to being away from home, studying in an unfamiliar environment and, for music students particularly, re-appraising their skills through feedback and comparison with new peers and teachers. Burt and Mills’ students were aware of their own subject weaknesses as they began music college, and while excited at beginning lessons with an esteemed teacher, they were apprehensive about judgements of their playing, particularly in relation to their first assessed performance. As at so many levels of education, assessment, self-esteem and learning were closely connected, giving teachers a challenging role to play in fostering confidence and self-evaluative skills alongside purely musical learning.

Anxiety about peer judgements is prevalent across studies of students in higher education, and might be mitigated by the peer assessment strategies that have been proposed by various authors during the past five years (Blom & Poole, Reference BLOM and POOLE2004; Daniel, Reference DANIEL2004; Hunter, Reference HUNTER2006). Encouraging students to see one another as allies, rather than competitors, is closer to the spirit of universities as places of collaborative learning and genuine enquiry – a spirit that can be difficult to preserve as higher education becomes more focused on the outcome of learning and less on its processes. Ryan Daniel reminds us that the traditional view of assessment has been for the expert to judge the novice, but that the alternative of doing assessment ‘with’ rather than ‘to’ students brings with it valuable learning in critiquing and giving feedback (Daniel, Reference DANIEL2004: 91). The difficulties that students initially experienced in taking on this role is a reminder to lecturers and teachers that assessment is not something to be undertaken lightly or easily: Diana Blom and Kim Poole's students found giving constructive comments challenging, particularly when assessing performances on instruments or repertoire they did not know well (Blom & Poole, Reference BLOM and POOLE2004: 119).

The problems of student confidence and expectations are not necessarily resolved by moving outside the realms of classical music: popular music studies suffers many of the same crises about who its students are and what they expect, despite being at the forefront of widening participation initiatives in music (Cloonan, Reference CLOONAN2005). In an article reviewing practices in British higher education institutions, Martin Cloonan identified a discipline split between sociological approaches to understanding popular music, and text-based study through analysis and performance. He suggested that popular music studies now needs to ‘move beyond what has been described as useful knowledge – such as that which allows one to make one's way in the world – into really useful knowledge which imparts a genuine understanding and a desire to change the world’ (Cloonan, Reference CLOONAN2005: 90). Such aims clearly have value for all aspects of music education, whatever the age group or discipline focus.

Strengthening music education as a field of study

Returning to the points made in our introduction, we note that the breadth of research topics and approaches we have considered in this editorial survey have contributed to music education as a field of study, whether through researching music teachers, their students, or the contexts in which music teaching and learning takes place. Much of the research is geared to practical outcomes, whether increasing the effectiveness of teaching music in primary schools, providing instrumental teachers with a more satisfactory career structure, enabling music education to become more inclusive, creating links between music in and out of schools, or ensuring that teachers in Higher Education foster confidence and self-evaluative skills in their students alongside purely musical learning. We make no apology for focusing upon research based upon the day-to-day realities of teaching music: such a focus has much to contribute to the understanding of musical behaviour, as well as to the development of excellent teaching practice. But in order for the journal to help sustain an intellectual community, researchers need the freedom to explore ideas and generate as many problems as solutions – and not always through the gathering and reporting of data, but also through the reflection, thought and insight of more philosophical writing.

As for urging or forecasting future developments, we have seen how the role of the music teacher is undergoing significant change, with the traditional boundaries breaking down, and with the emergence of the music leader. At the same time the ‘pupil voice’ is being regarded more seriously, both with regards to research and teaching. Undoubtedly technologies offer new ways of engaging with music, and encouraging greater pupil autonomy.

We hope, then, that this review of our five-year editorship has illustrated the ways in which this journal can serve the multiple purposes demanded of it by contemporary academic life, by publishing fine research of relevance to practitioners and of value to researchers seeking a greater understanding of musical teaching and learning. Given its international standing and readership, its diverse authors, the distinguished members of the editorial board and accomplished new editors, BJME is in a strong position to be a clear, authoritative and wise voice in educational debate. On its twenty-fifth anniversary, we look optimistically to the future of the journal – and of music education in all its forms.